Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as attractive solutions for last-mile broadband Internet access. A wireless mesh network is generally composed of wireless clients, a gateway portal that connects the mesh network to the Internet, and mesh nodes that form the backbone. The mesh nodes wirelessly communicate with each other to provide Internet connectivity for the clients. Routes between the mesh nodes could be multihop. For example, typically paths between clients and the gateway portal via the mesh nodes are multihop.
Conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols, such as 802.11 protocols and other conventional wireless protocols for transmitting data in a WMN tend to have different channel overhead. Metrics for selecting routing paths impact the resulting quality and capacity of paths in a WMN. However, conventional shortest-hop metrics used for routing, such as latency or number of hops, typically do not consider the channel overhead of the protocol to be used for transmitting data in the WMN and also typically do not consider the transmission rate of the links in the WMN, which have a significant impact on channel capacity. Accordingly, the conventional shortest-hop metrics may not provide for efficient routing to optimize bandwidth in mutihop networks where transmission rate and the type of protocol being used may impact bandwidth.